La Zona Muerta

“There are very few voices that can speak with any kind of authority or credibility on what happened back during the time when WCW and WWF were going head to head, and I think the audience is interested in that period of time, clearly. And like I said, nobody could speak to it quite the way I could.” – Eric Bischoff

“From day one that I’ve been in WCW, I’ve done nothing, nothing but deal with the bullshit of the politics behind that curtain. The fact of the matter is, I’ve got a wife, I’ve got three kids at home, and I really don’t need this shit.” – Vince Russo, somewhat in character, cutting a promo at Bash at the Beach 2000

“Don’t mess with Vince McMahon.” – Gerald Brisco on countless WWE documentaries

“Sting and his company tried to put us all out of jobs; he’s about to get what he deserves!” – John Bradshaw Layfield being fed dopey lines from the back during Sting vs. HHH at WrestleMania 31

“When things have settled down a bit I will pursue, as my primary goal in life, the killer or killers.” – OJ Simpson

So, “Who Killed WCW?” Something, much like the Montreal Screwjob, which will be endlessly debated, heated, reheated, regurgitated, dug up, buried and fretted about, often by people who had little vested interest, something that has a pretty clear answer already. There are TWO (reputable) books about it (and probably dozens that reference them or talk about it in smaller terms), for Gotch’s sake! When I heard the crew behind Dark Side of the Ring was doing a documentary on this ground that has WELL TRED, to say the VERY least, my first thought was “why?” My second and third thoughts were less charitable and were largely unfit for print.

WCW was killed when Turner Broadcasting thought that the expenses of operating it outweighed the ratings it brought in. The end. In this case, failure certainly has many fathers, but that’s the actual answer. Jaime Kellner pulled the plug and, if WCW had still been doing well, perhaps he wouldn’t have. The landscape at Turner changed tremendously at the turn of the millenium; no one there save the big man, R.E. Turner himself, believed in wrestling. With no allies left, they died. WWF scooped up the bones.

I really don’t know if I’ll keep looking at these shows in a “review” sense: we’ll let the METRICS decide. That feels like a pretty WCW-y decision, right? Here’s the tl;dr version; I didn’t really care for the first episode, but I might be too close to the subject, having been an actual WCW fan during the time in question, reading supplemental material, talking to fans and on a couple of occasions, people MUCH closer to the material about it for the last thirty years.

I almost don’t even want to talk about the show itself; I’d rather talk about WCW and my relationship to it, it being my entry point back into wrestling and becoming the kind of fan who writes about wrestling. Since La Zona Muerta is largely a one draft type of operation and I’m making the decisions here on the page, I suppose that’s what I’ll do, but let’s see what happens.

WCW was large; it contained multitudes. It often had the best wrestlers, for a while, it certainly had the best TV show. It was great. It also sucked and was often borderline depressing to follow. It’s frustrating to examine in this day and age, even when people have access to so much of it, because those people weren’t there and watch GIFs without context or simply parrot whatever WWE documentary that buries WCW this week. WWE, you see, even though they won the wrestling “war,” STILL make sure to go out of their way to let you know WCW stunk and that their way was the right one.

TERRA DE LOO, THE VINCE. WWE IS THE TRUE WAY.

We need a break and I’m only a few paragraphs in; I’ve already got too maudlin. And just who the HELL are you to doubt this fine man, anyway?

You think you know about jam up guys, but you all have NO IDEA

For me, WCW wasn’t just a southern rasslin’ company; it was a bridge. My father and I didn’t have a great deal in common and, when he left home and I would go hang out with him at his place, we had nothing to talk about. I had watched wrestling a little bit as a small child but honestly, as a studious, officious little know it all creep, I largely thought myself above it. After the enchantment of “rock and wrestling” wore off, even my parents only watched on occasion, typically the nights where we would record Saturday Night Live but get Saturday Night’s Main Event, instead. I have dim memories of watching WrestleMania III via closed circuit TV and beyond that… wrestling was hardly a factor in my life. I didn’t know what a “WCW” was… but I’d go over to Dad’s apartment on a Saturday afternoon circa 1995 and he’d throw on something called “WCW Saturday Night.” And oh, hey, look! They have Hulk Hogan. I remember him! He sucks! They have Macho Man! I remember him! He was cool! They have these Mexican dudes in masks like in El Santo movies and wow, they do cool stuff! They’ve got this excited guy in facepaint named Sting and this impossibly jacked dude named Lex Luger who looks like a He-Man action figure and they’ve got this old guy with bleached blonde hair in a sequined robe and some Mortal Kombat looking dude coming in and what the hell is all of this?

I needed something to do with my Dad, some common ground. Watching wrestling with him helped us lay that ground… and slowly but surely, I was hooked. We can laugh now when WWE or AEW brings back some fossil and expects them to draw eyeballs, a tactic that feels somewhat dubious today… but I’m living, breathing proof that, thirty years ago… that shit worked. My dim memories of WWF wrestling from the Golden Era gave me a leg up as I slowly learned about this new landscape. Soon, I found myself watching without Dad, checking out Nitro (eventually; took me a while to clue in, there), Saturday Night, even the Pro and Main Event if I had some spare time! I got in on the ground floor in time for the Scott Hall “jump,” the tail end of Flair / Savage, the rise of DDP, the reformation of the Horsemen (instantly my favorites), the proliferation of the luchadores, cool guys coming in from Japan… all of that.

It was a good time to be a wrestling fan.

I watched this Clash of the Champions live when it aired and for all the loose talk about “cinema” these days in wrestling when a camera doesn’t cut for ninety seconds, teenaged me thought this was cooler than ninety percent of movies at the time

And it’s positively EXHAUSTING to hear about how it sucked again for the umpteenth time from the architects of it’s rise and fall.

Does anyone TRULY blame Eric Bischoff for the death of WCW? It wasn’t his to kill by the time it died. Did he do things to harm it? Yes. Did he do things to help it? Yes. But his world weary, put upon “everyone blames me but here’s why it’s not my fault” schtick is so automatically repellant and tiresome that it immediately makes me not want to watch further. Kevin Nash laconically asks us in the beginning “do you want the real story or the bullshit one?” OH, PLEASE, MR. NASH, YOU GREAT PURVEYOR OF TRUTH. I’M A SMART FAN SO PLEASE DON’T KAYFABE ME BROTHER. I mean, who is that cool guy, laid back act supposed to appeal to? “Lemme pour a glass of vino.” Get bent. Just another figure that I despise, someone I would NEVER talk to about any of this, a real life ghoul squeezing ONE MORE DROP FROM THE GRAPE. GET IT? A WINE REFERENCE. Kevin Nash: Sommelier is the TV show the DSotR guys should have made, instead.

The more I watched this show, the more frustrating I found it, to say the least. You have the author of the “Nitro” book (a great read and NOT a repudiation of “The Death of WCW” by RD Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez) now being an Eric Bischoff apologist, producer Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson pining for the days of WCW, talking about how cool the NWO was when he wasn’t exactly IN the WWF at the time of the angle he was gushing over (lest us forget, he was still “Flex Canvana” laboring in the salt mines of the WMC Memphis studio when the NWO threw Rey Misterio Jr. into a production trailer… he wasn’t in WWF proper until November of that year. On the other hand, this is the guy who claimed he “grew up” reading “Black Adam” comic books), a couple of Turner execs, Neil Pruitt (a cat who was much more responsible for the NWO’s coolness than one would suspect, but never forget those promos with the jump cuts were an invention of necessity, not out of an attempt to be cool. They WERE cool, but they were very much an attempt to salvage awful, rambling promos from Hulk Hogan blithering on about nothing in particular), a couple of workers like Booker T and Diamond Dallas Page and Konnan and Madusa… Kevin Sullivan… and that’s about it.

As for the content? You get to hear that Bischoff didn’t know about WCW (impossible), you get to hear for the tenth time that Bischoff “wasn’t sure” if Hogan would turn heel (obviously there was a lot of uncertainty about that, but the day of? C’mon, that’s like when Hogan talks about being “not sure if Andre the Giant would lay down at WrestleMania III”), about how WCW didn’t have the best wrestlers (boy is THAT simply untrue; it had long been perceived as the workrate promotion at least in the US. Bischoff also contradicts himself, saying WCW didn’t have the best wrestlers in one part of the doc and then proclaiming that the talent WCW had was world class in another), how good the Disney / MGM tapings were (they weren’t), how WCW was hobbled by Standards and Practices (debatable) and how wunderkind Bischoff turned TV production on it’s ear (well, I guess that part’s true). The one thing I found a bit troubling as far as narrative spinning goes was Bischoff insinuating that Sting wasn’t in condition to perform on the infamous day of Starrcade 1997. He didn’t flat out say that and he’s tiptoed around that minefield before but… here’s the reality of that situation; Hulk Hogan changed the creative he didn’t like. End of. At least they SLIGHTLY counter balanced that by having people talk about how egoless and apolitical Sting was behind the scenes.

There’s nothing to chew on, no meat on the bone for pretty much anyone who has ever read one issue of the Observer. When the best part was probably Bret Hart saying “Thanks for nothing, go fuck yourself,” as a eulogy for WCW, I don’t know what you want me to tell you. As a WCW fan, I found this disappointing, as someone who considers himself at least slightly “smart” to the business, I found this full of eyerolls and inaccuracies of varying sizes. The only real net positive I can take away from this is that hopefully this show will be the “definitive” version of this tale, despite it’s lack of depth, simply so we don’t have to endure another permutation of it in ten years.